Hi. I used to use The Bat! when I first bought it in 2009. Back then Outlook was awful. Useless. Anyway, I eventually ended up trying Outlook several years later and it had got its act together so I've been using it instead.

However, I'm really annoyed with one aspect of its behaviour, and after receiving an email from The Bat! offering a discount I'm curious as to whether it can beat Outlook on this issue or not?

I want to automatically delete the most persistent spam. I'm sick of seeing (sometimes hundreds of) the same spam in my junk folder - all with the same subjects or keywords. So I set up a rule to permanently delete them so I have less junk to trawl through for false positives.

However, Outlook runs the junk filter first. It identifies them as spam and then refuses to run my rules. I want my email client to respect my rules first, and then run spam filter checks. Can the Bat! do this?

I have no idea what you are using to filter spam so take this for what it is worthThe Bat has highly configurable rules and you can move them around to sort in any order.I use a spam plugin to track who is wanted and who is not. I have rules in the bat thea automatically deal with spam based on my criteria and another that moves certain ones to the spam folder for review. The first filter exposrts them numerically sequenced then deletes them

You can set up the order of the filter execution. It will do what you tell it, not necessarily what you want so prepare for a bit of frustration

Hello Rick. Thanks for replying. I'm using Outlook 2010. Neither my SPAMfighter plugin or Outlook's own spam system allow filtering on subject or keywords. They only want to either put spam in a junk folder, delete it all, or block the sender.

My workaround was to set up rules in Outlook to automatically delete persistent spam with words like "remortgage" "healthcare" etc. in the subject. However, Outlook won't run these rules until after spam checking. But after spam checking these emails have moved to the junk folder. The rules aren't run on that folder and so are rendered useless.

So what I wanted to know about TheBat! was does it run rules before checking for spam - or does it allow you to filter spam with keywords in the subject and automatically delete those emails whilst still putting anything without a keyword rule into junk for false positive checking?

2) In AntispamSniper, add your "Stop words for subjects" (very easy) and choose to delete the emails from the server only (the default) - choosing the minimum spam ratio for a keyword to be used and the minimum number of black keywords to block a message.

3) Make a sorting filter with your subject stop words to be applied to the messages in the Junk folder. The rule should move the concerned messages to a folder you possibly could check the content, before to delete them. With AntispamSniper installed, you will have to apply the filter manually using the contextual menu or a shortcut.